And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.

Firefox is like 25 million lines of code. Incredibly complex code, much of it decades old and wrapped in layers of legacy architectural patterns (see XUL, XBL), with severe backwards compatibility considerations (if you break existing websites or people's extensions, they might switch and not come back).

You suggest that NOT rewriting all of that in a couple of years is "hubris"?!? Rust 1.0 didn't happen until 2015 mind you, and Firefox OS was canceled in 2016. The timeline doesn't even make sense.

This kind of nonsense is why I can't take HN seriously when it comes to discussions about Mozilla. Criticisms are perfectly fine (and there are plenty of legitimate criticism to make) but people just abandon all logic when it comes to them for some reason and upvote mindless drivel because Mozilla Bad.

FYI, there are more than 6 million lines of Rust in Firefox, so it's not like it hasn't been happening.

But I'm sure people would complain if they moved operations to Brno and Warsaw too.

HN would complain (and indeed has complained) every time they try to find a non-Google source of revenue. The advertisement for the Disney movie with a Red Panda got flamed despite being completely innocuous, Pocket and Mozilla VPN and Lockwise got flamed for being "distractions" or whatever, etc.

"Focus on the browser", everyone says, except that browsers are the most commoditized market you could possibly immagine, where their competitors (3 of the richest companies in the entire world) literally spend billions of dollars pushing their own browsers as loss-leaders, and also they come pre-installed on billions of devices by default. What kind of "business model" do you expect, exactly? Do like Brave and build a crypto scheme around in-page ad replacement?

Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side project at the point that it got cancelled (the parts that had been largely successful had already been merged into Firefox, the rest was either nowhere near ready or being completely rewritten or both, and the main application for it at the time was some attempts to make a browser for running web apps in VR headsets at high framerates). Thunderbird was a side project.

But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money, like the branded VPN service. Or projects like FirefoxOS, which ultimately failed but still resulted in a lot of improvements to Firefox and web standards. And it wasn't a bad idea either, it just put the cart (mobile OS) before the horse (the web APIs that are needed to make a browser-based mobile OS successful, like access to GPS and IMU hardware, which didn't exist at the time) without the heft to really push through the barriers while competing directly with Apple and Google.

It seems like people define "frivolous side projects" as "anything Mozilla did that didn't end up being incredibly successful" and anything that did become incredibly successful gets taken for granted. "What did Rome ever do for us" rewritten as a tech parable.

(don't tell me that "we're going to create a whole new language to fix security issues in our web browser" didn't sound a bit frivolous in 2012)

You only have to compile when you actually want to test the behavior, which tends to be right on the first try more often as a result of the strict compiler.

- LLMs have clearly been trained on a lot of Rust as well

- Compile times are counterbalanced by strong compiler with excellent error messages, and "cargo check" can catch many issues without a full build.

- If you're willing to accept Go levels of performance from Rust, there's nothing preventing you from using copies and clones rather than borrows, which makes most code dead simple.

- For most major dependency types, there exists a clear "winner" in terms of community adoption, so the fact that it's not in the stdlib is not that problematic.

I think it's the use of pointers and "if err != nil {}" error handling spam. It reads as a highly compromised imitation of Python and C rather than a solid execution of some other idea.

Rust is not the most beautiful language out there but it doesn't trigger any such reaction for me. The ? operator and "match", which I use constantly, more than compensate for some of the sigil noise which I barely need to look at much less write most of the time. So Rust wins on that comparison for me.

The "func name() -> retval" syntax also grew on me. I like the fact that Python type annotations copied that approach, and C-style declarations look ugly to me now. Same with C-style /* */ comments.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100098

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

>> The proof this site is misnamed is that a post criticizing systemd gets downvoted, probably by people who have never questioned why an [[ init system ]] needs to become half the operating system.

So no, I didn't bring it up.

I find the whole argument kind of dumb anyway. People talk about this as if it was a violation of the "Unix Philosophy" when Unix and BSD are developed even moreso in the same way - the init system is sitting in the same repo as the libc, the kernel, and the entire rest of the OS. Linux is alone amongst operating systems in making core system components swappable like to that degree in the first place. It's fine to like that kind of flexibility, but a bit silly to act as though that approach is fundamentally superior. If you want to use non-systemd tools, use a non-systemd distro, that is your choice. Just quit whining about 99.9999% of the other software users on the planet not catering to it.

I, a US citizen, got fingerprinted by passport control in Austria 2 weeks ago, and they took a picture of my face and asked for personal details. That's pretty much how passport control works universally in any developed country, only the "how they get the information" changes. Sometimes they already have it and sometimes they ask for it.

I've not noticed any significant difference between the other two.